Quantum Starlight

by Rambling Writer

14 - What Goes Around

Streamhaven, October 9
8:16 PM

“Here go-” Serene stopped walking and blinked.

Her head still throbbing, Starlight looked around in a panic. For a second, she didn’t know where she was or what was going on. She was in a large, circular room, sterile white from-

Wait. This… this was the original Streamhaven time machine. From the looks of things, Serene hadn’t yet gone into the time machine to go forward, although she had gone two minutes into the past. Okay. So far, so good.

But… but they’d been in the down in the failsafe racks. Her future self, anyway. Her other future self. Shouldn’t she be in there when she superposed or whatever? Why was she in this version of herself and not her future self? That one was the closest. Both spatially and chronologically. Unless her future self wasn’t actually down there. But why wouldn’t she be down there? That would imp-

The answer hit her like a ton of bricks. She wasn’t down in the failsafe racks. Which meant she hadn’t traveled back. Which meant the Fracture never happened.

Maybe.

With everypony’s focus on Serene, Starlight picked Sunburst out of the crowd. He found her, and they just stared at each other, dumbstruck. Then, as if they were thinking the same thing, they simultaneously turned to look at Serene.

She was looking back and forth between, and the best word Starlight could come up with was “haunted”. Her eyes were distant and her entire body was subtly tense. It almost looked like she’d gone into shock.

“Ma’am?” asked one of the scientists. “Is something wrong?”

“No,” Serene said, a touch too quickly. “I just… really realized what a Big Deal this is. I mean, really realized, to the point of, wow, time travel is actually a thing and I’m doing it and I already did it and I mean holy crap.” She grinned. Starlight suspected it was forced, but she couldn’t tell. “Sorry.” She turned back to the airlock. “Welp. Here goes nothing. Again.” She stepped into the airlock. The door closed behind her. She took a few steps down the corridor.

Nothing else happened.

She took a few more steps.

Nothing else happened.

Serene vanished down the corridor.

Nothing else happened.

Starlight and Sunburst exchanged glances. The time machine had first broken right after Serene had entered the corridor. Right now, it hadn’t. Good sign? Bad sign? Starlight was leaning towards “good”, but she wasn’t going to make any assumptions until Serene came back out. It had been five minutes, right? She started counting under her breath. One one-thousand, two one-thousand…

At around six hundred seventeen one-thousand, the airlock door hissed open and Serene stepped out, looking none the worse for wear. Maybe slightly rattled, but only because Starlight was looking for it. She looked at Sunburst and quirked a quick half-smile. “Guess who’s back?” she said.

The cheering that came from the scientists wasn’t quite as ballistic as it had been when Serene had come from two minutes in the future, but it was still loud. Serene was waving her hooves, pointing at a watch on her fetlock and a nearby clock, but nopony was paying any attention to her.

Starlight slipped out of the crowd and made her way to Sunburst. “Are we… are we clear?” she whispered to him.

“I, I think so,” said Sunburst, pushing his glasses up. “If, if something were going to happen, it, it would’ve happened by now. I think.”

Starlight chewed her lip. Thinking it was okay was a bit more of a chance than she wanted to take, but for now, it was all they had.

“All right, all right!” Serene yelled, waving her hooves. “Settle down!” Once she had a semblance of silence, she clapped her hooves together and rubbed them. “So. It works. Awesome, right?” (A restrained cheer.) “But we gotta get to data processing, and this baby draws a lotta power, so let’s wrap up here quickly and get it all shut down.” She sidled over to Sunburst and began pulling him towards the exit. “Hate to leave you, but Sunny and I need a beer to celebrate. You guys want one once you’re done, shoot me the receipt, and I’ll see how I can justify it as a business expense.”

A groan came from the scientists, but they started doing what Starlight assumed was the shutdown procedure. Starlight trotted up to the exit and Sunburst wiggled out of Serene’s grip. She wasn’t restraining him, just pulling him away from the crowd. “Um, Serene, no, no offense, but… why, why do you think we need to head to the bar right now? I’m just fine. It’s, I don’t think that… that anything’s going to, y’know, happen.”

For a moment, Serene suddenly switched back to Monarch Serene. The one who’d devoted everything to saving the world. The one who wouldn’t let anything stand in her way. “Maybe,” she said quietly, steel in her voice. “Still, it’s all very, very overwhelming, and we need a beer, don’t we, Sunny?” She grinned hollowly.

Sunburst gulped and took a step back. “Um, uh, o-okay, y-yeah.”

“You too, Starry.”

Starlight’s opinion was pretty much the opposite of Sunburst’s. “Yeah. You know what? A beer sounds really good right now.”

---

Streamhaven, October 9
8:37 PM

Starlight, Sunburst, and Serene were sitting around a table in the bar in perhaps the most awkward silence in the history of awkward silences, which was saying a lot.

Nopony really wanted to look at each other, so they just stared down into their glasses. Every once in a while, one of them would look up, look at the pony on their right for a second, look at the pony on their left for a second, look back down. It didn’t matter which pony it was, it was always those actions for those durations in that order. Sometimes, the stars would align and two of the ponies would be looking at each other at the same time. They’d hold their gaze for maybe two seconds, blink, and look away with such force you’d think they were reacting to a flashbang grenade going off while it was perched on their muzzle.

Serene took another swig of beer and coughed. “Sorry I tried to beat you guys up and force you to work in my ‘survive the End of Time’ program thing in an alternate timeline that doesn’t exist anymore.”

Silence. Because, really, what are you supposed to say to that?

Serene coughed again. “It… it doesn’t exist anymore, right?” She looked up at Sunburst. “I mean, everything worked this time around, so we never had anything happen to break time in the first place. Right?” Her voice was strained, desperate. It was clear what she was asking for. She didn’t want to go through it all again.

“It, it shouldn’t,” muttered Sunburst. He didn’t tear his gaze from his glass. “You’re right. Nothing, um, happened to break time. And did, did you look around as we were coming here?” He raised his head and switched between staring at Starlight and staring at Serene. “Monarch doesn’t, doesn’t exist anymore. You founded Monarch when you went back in time, so if Monarch doesn’t exist, you didn’t go back in time. Haven’t gone. Won’t go. Will not have gone.” He grunted and thudded his head on the table. “Someone really needs to make tenses for time travel.”

“Wait, wasn’t the physics building built from a donation from Monarch?” asked Starlight. She finally looked up, too. “So how did-”

“Royal grant. I checked,” said Sunburst. He pushed his glasses up his muzzle. “Best guess, when the time spell collapsed and the timeline, uh, reshuffled, it fell into a, a state of lowest energy that is essentially the original timeline without any changes caused by, uh, Monarch or Serene’s own travels, due to the original timeline already being a state of lowest, lowest energy that is now unobtainable due to Serene not going back in time.”

Starlight and Serene both blinked at him. “Equestrian, please?” said Starlight flatly.

Sunburst rolled his eyes. “Blah blah timey-wimey stuff blah the timeline’s the same as it was before, only without Monarch, due to Reasons. Serene, what do you remember about this? The, the new timeline, I mean. Don’t you have memories of it? You’re the only one who was here.”

Serene released a bitter, barking laugh. “Sunny, I’ve got three different sets of memories for the past seven years. My first time through the original timeline, my second time through it, and my time through this one. Working it all out’s gonna be kinda tricky.”

“Can, can you try?”

“Fine, just… Gimme a sec.” Serene took a few deep breaths and closed her eyes. After a few seconds, she said, “Okay, best I can tell, whenever I had Monarch invest in something in Streamhaven in the original timeline, in this one, some other company or some rich guy just happened to step in and do pretty much the same thing.”

“Okay, yeah, that, that sounds like what I was thinking of.”

More awkward silence.

“So now what?” asked Starlight. “We’re not on bad terms anymore, so what do we do?”

Serene shrugged. “Keep quiet. You think anypony’s gonna believe us? Just… try to be like it was before, I guess.” She snorted. “Probably impossible, but hey. Let’s dream.” She took a long drink from her bottle. “It’ll be the least stressful time I’ve had in seven years,” she muttered.

Starlight reached out and put a hoof on Serene’s. “Then that means it can only go up, right?” she asked. “And if you ever want to talk about mistakes you’ve made in pasts that don’t exist, feel free to write me a letter. I…” She paused. How much to say about her first time travel forays? She couldn’t just dump it all on Serene now. She decided to go for hinting at it. “I’ve got a lot to tell you, if you’re willing to listen. Just not right now.”

For a second, Serene didn’t say or do anything. Then she pulled her hoof out and patted Starlight’s. She smiled. It was probably the most genuine smile Starlight had seen on her. It wasn’t generically cheerful and it wasn’t a mask. It was subdued and warm. “Thanks. I might just take you up on that offer.”

After a moment, Sunburst coughed. “So what about the, uh, the experiments? We, we’ve seen how dangerous they can be, but, uh…” He twisted a lock of his mane around a hoof.

Serene grunted. “Can’t really stop them,” she said. “Can you imagine? ‘Hey, we totally can’t do these anymore, we might break time. I saw it. Well, no, it’s not broken now, we fixed it and it never broke in the first place. Yes, in spite of paradoxes and changing the past being impossible. Totally. Honest. Why do you have that straitjacket?’” She sighed and rolled her eyes. “All they’ve seen is that it works perfectly. Kinda hard to abort after that. Guess I’ll pretend to have a freakout on what if the failsafe fails and at least double up on that. Keep the rest of the experiments running as usual and come crying to you if something Goes Horribly Wrong.”

Sunburst coughed. “In, in that case, I, I might know somepony who, who’d gladly join you.” He paused. “Well, um, kind of. It’s, it’s complicated.”

“Lemme guess,” Serene sighed. “You met him in the original timeline after it all went down, got real friendly with him, but now that it’s all reset, he doesn’t know you, even though you know him.”

“M-more or less,” Sunburst said, pushing his glasses up his muzzle.

“Great. I knew this was gonna happen, but…” Serene sighed again and took a gulp of beer. Slamming the bottle down on the table, she muttered, “Fucking time travel.”

Comments

[Circut Breaker]

"Fucking time travel", indeed.

[redmar]

Doctor Whooves will be able to adjust rather quickly and then he'll start thinking about how to integrate Starsirl's spell into his design in order to built an improved version of the time machine that can travel through space as well as time and allows you to change the past.

[tsaukpaetra]

Yeah, best to simply leave it a footnote of a loophole, one of those forbidden knowledge things.